SAP’s David Jonker on 6 Key Data Management Trends for 2016

Looking ahead to 2016 David Jonker, senior director of big data at SAP, offered six key business and technology trends that will take the market by storm, including a continued interest in in-memory processing, enablement of real-time data and analytics, and an increased focus on advanced analytics and machine learning.

1-Adoption of In-Memory: “There has been a lot of progress made around the adoption of in-memory,” Jonker said. IBM’s commitment to Spark was another indication of the importance of in-memory processing in a big data strategy. His expectation is that there will continue to be a strong growth in this area with greater adoption of SAP HANA. By streamlining an environment, reducing legacy systems, and bringing it onto a central in memory platform organizations can handle operations and perform analytics, he observed.

2-Need for Single Version of the Truth about Critical Business Metrics: Further supporting a growing need for analytics and real-time data, SAP Digital Boardroom was released in October with the purpose of utilizing line-of-business data from the SAP S/4HANA suite and SAP HANA Cloud Platform to provide a single source of truth about a company’s critical business metrics. “It really carries on this idea of in-memory and real-time. We’re seeing a desire for companies to adopt core data management infrastructure around in-memory so they can do real-time analytics against their business,” Jonker said.

3-Increasing Focus on Advanced Analytics: Jonker predicts the market will continue to see a focus on advanced analytics, machine learning, data mining, and predictive analytics. “We’ve seen a lot of sophistication in terms of the algorithms and in applying those kinds of techniques and technologies,” Jonker said.

4-Expanding Use of Geospatial Data: Geospatial and imagery data is another hot trend that Jonker sees entering the picture in 2016, citing the number of drones currently in use and a movement toward tracking assets. “It’s generating a lot of imagery of various areas and assets,” Jonker said. “We’re starting to see some really interesting companies in this space. I think we’ll start to see this really come to the forefront in terms of what companies are doing.”

5-Growing Concerns Around Data Governance and Privacy Considerations: Growing controversy over the right to be forgotten will be seen in Europe as protection regulations are discussed next year, Jonker noted.

6-Cloud Formations Will Increase. As the cloud continues to entice enterprises for a variety of uses, Jonker noted users will continue to migrate to the cloud. “Provisioning of hardware is very expensive and being able to scale out these IT environments very quickly can be complicated,” Jonker said. “A lot of companies are interested in figuring out how to do that in the cloud. Our expectation is we’ll see a larger percentage of our big data deployments and data management deployments in the cloud along with our analytic tools to bring together that whole package.”